So how do you go to a National Conference and never leave the building? By signing up for the Keystone Conference! Now in it’s second year, the Keystone Conference offers educators K-20 a new way to get valuable information about best practices in the use of video conferencing. The conference attracts educators, videoconferencing leaders, content providers, and industry representatives from across the country and around the world. By working together these participants are exploring how interactive videoconferencing technology can help:

motivate students and ignite opportunities for learning.

users reach beyond the limitations of their local and regional resources.

create links with users around the world.

Each day begins with a keynote speaker and is followed by sessions in three strands: Leadership, Teaching, and Training. Remote sites can choose to follow one strand or can “session hop” sending on how they connect to the conference. For a complete schedule check out the .pdf at this address:

Chris Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. His funded research includes a grant from the National Science Foundation to aid middle school students learning science via shared virtual environments with digitized museum artifacts, a grant from the Joyce Foundation to aid the Milwaukee Public Schools in implementing a knowledge portal for teacher professional development, and a grant from Harvard to explore applications of wireless handheld devices in higher education.

Chris recently served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Educational and Psychological Assessment, a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s Expert Panel on Technology, and a member of the International Steering Committee for the Second International Technology in Education Study. In 1996-97, he served as a Senior Program Director at the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Boston Tech Academy, an experimental small high school in the Boston Public School system, funded by the Gates Foundation. Chris recently completed a co-edited volume on Scaling Up Success: Lessons Learned from Technology-based Educational Innovation, published by Jossey-Bass in January 2005.

Successful Meetings magazine lists Dr. David Thornburg as one of the top 21 speakers in the United States. His dynamic, thought-provoking presentations provide transformative experiences to well over 100,000 people per year. His monthly commentaries for PBS on the impact of emerging technologies on learning expand his reach far beyond the podium.

But David is more than a public speaker. He is an award-winning futurist, author and consultant whose clients range across the public and private sector, both in the United States and in Brazil. His corporate clients range from small startup ventures to some of the most dynamic large corporations in the world. His razor-sharp focus on the fast-paced world of modern communication media and its impact on learning has placed him in constant demand as a keynote speaker and workshop leader.

As the founder and Director of Global Operations for the Thornburg Center, and as Senior Fellow of the Congressional Institute for the Future, he conducts research and provides staff development in the areas of educational futures, multimedia, communications and whole mind education throughout the Americas. He helps clients to think intelligently about the future and is active in exploring ways that telecommunications and multimedia will change the face of learning, both at home and in the classroom.

His educational philosophy is based on the idea that students learn best when they are constructors of their own knowledge. He also believes that students who are taught in ways that honor their learning styles and dominant intelligences retain the native engagement with learning with which they entered school. A central theme of his work is that we must prepare students for their future, not for our past.